When I'm Here

“And were the world to look at me when I’m here,” Rémy Zaugg’s statement written across his painting from 1995/98 addresses its counterpart—us. A work of art has a history of its own, but every encounter is in the here and now. While the artwork itself seemingly remains the same, new people continually stand in front of it—in a new context, at a different moment in time.

When I’m Here brings together works dating from 1970 to 2026 by more than fifty artists, almost half of whom live in Basel. The works not only reflect a wide range of artistic practices and contexts, but they also come from three different Basel-based collections: the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel (the public art collection of Basel), the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, and the collection of the Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt. In the exhibition, viewers experience the works in different thematic constellations. At times, the focus is on the space we, as viewers, find ourselves in; at others, on bodies and portraits, everyday objects and social structures, or the landscape before us; and, throughout, on the space between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Taking Zaugg’s poetic proposition as inspiration, When I’m Here reflects on what it means to be from or in a place and opens up questions about how art takes shape in relation to its social context but also how artworks relate to and enter into a dialogue with each other.